time

 Time zones are trippy. And the more you think about them (or  have to deal with them) the trippier they become. 

As a kid in the United States with a large family that scattered coast to coast when life on Long Island got expensive in the '80s, calculating the Pacific to Eastern time difference was second nature, and we visited Jill in California and Kathy and Tony in Phoenix enough that I became adept at avoiding jet lag. 

But California to Pennsylvania is a measly three hours. Travel from the US east coast to Europe, to the Middle East, or to East Asia is a whole different ballgame. 

I remember once in the early oughts calling Adam on a business trip in Japan--a thirteen hour time difference from Michigan--knowing I would be waking him up in the middle of the night. The front desk person at the hotel argued with me about putting the call through to his room and scolded me as though I was unaware of the time. I don't even remember what I needed to talk to him about, but I remember that at the time--a time before cell phones--it was important enough to wake him up since he would be unreachable once he left the hotel for the wheel rim plant. 

The deal we had when I spent a semester in Moscow in 1999 had been much kinder. Once a week he would stay up until 11, and his call would wake me up at 7 the next morning. Late for him, early for me--even trade. Poor my host mother, though. She usually heard the ringing before I did.

It wasn't only about finding a time when both parties would be awake. The calculus was more complicated than that. We had to find a time when both parties would be someplace near phones, one phone with a known number, and one phone with an international calling plan activated.

When I moved to Moscow last year, Jim was flabbergasted by the eight-hour time difference, and his wonder that I could be going to bed just as he was finishing lunch, that it could be dark for me and light for him reminded me how trippy time zones actually are. I was flabbergasted by the ease of communication. Having my children and my best friends in my pocket all the time is a far cry from the days of weekly phone calls and $3 per hour Internet cafe visits. 

These days, I'm living in Yerevan, eight hours ahead of my beloveds in the Eastern time zone and one hour ahead my students in the Moscow time zone, but this week, I'm in Vancouver for a conference, three hours behind my beloveds and ten hours behind my students. Yesterday, I went to bed at 6PM and slept until 1AM. Then I went back to bed--but sadly not to sleep--until 3, when I finally opened my laptop and started responding to student essays ahead of Zoom meetings in the Vancouver morning/Moscow evening. I write this as I'm keeping myself awake for two more Zoom meetings this evening Vancouver time with students for whom it will already be morning tomorrow. 

For me, that's the trippiest part--when my today is your tomorrow, or my today is your yesterday. There's something about the border of midnight that throws the arbitrariness of the whole system into stark relief.

Nothing highlights the trippiness of time zones, though, more than the travel to and from Yerevan. From North America to Yerevan, flights and layovers take about 18-22 hours, depending on the duration of the layovers. When flying west, this gets compressed into around ten hours of calendar time. I left Yerevan before sunrise on Tuesday morning and arrived in Vancouver mid afternoon, still on Tuesday. When I return, this same amount of time will be stretched out over two calendar days. I leave Vancouver Tuesday evening and land in Yerevan before sunrise Thursday morning. I lived yesterday twice, but next week, I'll skip over a day. This is exceedingly trippy. 

The summer that I worked in Indiana but lived in Michigan, it took me negative half an hour to get to work but an hour and a half to get home. That daily time warp was just humorous  this whole day time warp is wild  

The upside of all of this is that sometimes jet lag gives you gifts. Today, since I was awake anyway and had finished preparing for the days meetings, I went to the water for sunrise. 

Just me, the shore birds, and the joggers on the sea wall in English Bay. 

It's actually not a terrible thing to have my perspective so turned around once in a while. It's an opportunity for a reset, for deciding over again whether to aim for lark or for nightingale.